Biden squeezed from both sides over student loan forgiveness

President Joe Biden‘s White House began the year on defense over one of his most prominent campaign promises.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre went on CNN on Tuesday morning to tout the president’s accomplishments, then quickly found herself on the defensive over student loan forgiveness.

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“Let me jump in here,” the network’s Audie Cornish said. “You alluded to some kitchen table issues, drug prices for one, also housing is another issue, education is another issue. The student loan issue was not something addressed by the White House in the end in a comprehensive way, according to many young voters. Are you going to try to finish those jobs in particular?”

Jean-Pierre, who had not mentioned student loans when asked about the White House’s 2024 priorities, responded by saying Biden “took steps” despite the obstacles.

“The president put forth a plan, he wanted to keep his promise on dealing with the student loan debt that is really crushing families across the country, and he took steps even though the plan that he put forth was stopped, certainly, by folks in Congress.”

While Congress did vote to overturn Biden’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan, the president vetoed it. Instead, it was the Supreme Court that ruled the move was unconstitutional, leading to the situation Cornish alluded to.

Since that day, the administration has made a series of smaller moves that it says amount to $132 billion for 3.6 million debtors, which Jean-Pierre referenced in the interview, saying, “He still took action even though his hands were tied by the courts.”

That answer may not satisfy young voters, who polls show are beginning to wane on voting for Biden, but it also has conservatives fired up.

The Republican National Committee posted a clip of the exchange, saying Biden took action even though his “unconstitutional, unilateral student loan bailout was blocked by the courts.”

Biden has made the case himself that he’s now acting against the court’s ruling.

“I went to the Supreme Court to eliminate student debt that was out there,” the president said in Milwaukee on Dec. 20. “And guess what? The Supreme Court ruled against it. But I still got 136 million people’s debt relieved.”

Illegal or not, student loan forgiveness advocates are cheering the effort.

“To be clear, young voters are upset that an extreme conservative majority on the Supreme Court and Republicans in Congress are fighting tooth and nail to block President Biden’s efforts to address the burden of student loan debt,” said Aissa Canchola Bañez, senior adviser for the Student Borrower Protection Center. “The president and this administration aren’t backing down, and as a result, more than $130 billion in student loan debt has been canceled, and there is no sign that they will stop anytime soon.”

A bigger battle looms on the horizon over future cancellation efforts and the Department of Education’s SAVE plan, under which most student loans would never be fully repaid.

But even as Republicans vow to nix that program, it won’t help people who already have student debt, meaning Jean-Pierre and Biden are likely to take more questions like those from Cornish.

“They have heard from you that, essentially, this is something the president has tried to do,” the CNN host said. “Do you think that over time, they start to feel like trying isn’t enough?”

Biden announced the original student debt transfer in August 2022, six weeks before the midterm elections, and the program was blocked by the Supreme Court in June 2023. With Congress and the courts uncooperative, it remains to be seen what the Biden White House will do to appease student loan forgiveness champions ahead of the 2024 election.

“The president knows there is a lot more work to be done,” Jean-Pierre said. “And that’s what 2024 is going to be able — we are going to be able to get done.”

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Neal McCluskey, director of the CATO Institute’s Center for Education Reform, expects that Biden will keep trying — and will wind up in in a courtroom again.

“Student debt cancellation advocates are doing what we’d expect them to do: pushing for as much cancellation as they can get, which presumably would be total cancellation if possible,” he said. “The Biden administration has clearly been responding to them and seems intent on trying every possible cancellation avenue until each one is shut down by the courts.”